The quiet mornings had left me by 2004 and I no longer noticed butterflies flying in and out of sprayed water. Pastel walls and dingy, white floor tiles flew past me only in faint, occurring passages as I walked the halls of the children’s hospital. I had resisted the tugging of the Lord my whole life, and at 34, I was broken beyond description. My little boy was dying and I could not stop the flow of tears.
I had dreamed about him since I was a boy myself. I still remember his smell. That faint laugh has been eroded by time, but I reminisce even as I write. He was only seven years old and that year proved to be the most important of my life. I could do nothing to save him, not even from suffering for ten months that year. I could not find God in the chapel, nor in the quiet moments in our room late at night. I listened to his breath at night as I knelt by his bed to pray for his deliverance. The faint sounds of a harmonica resonated into our room from down the hall. An Amish father did what he could to comfort his own child by playing an upbeat circus tune that I still cannot identify to this day.
I called on Jesus late one night while my son slept. The machines beside his bed quietly beeped and churned. “Save me Lord,” I asked. “Help me, please!”
I became a Christian that night. I began the slow process of learning how to depend on Jesus, how to trust him and how to love him no matter what.
My son died later on that year hundreds miles from home in a Philadelphia hospital. As I write this story, I still struggle. My heart flutters each time I think about our reunion. Death cannot break the bond of love that my son and I still share today, nor can it break the bond that I share with Jesus and my new Christian faith.